Rosalind Hursthouse has an entry on virtue ethics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where she tries to explain why “happiness” is not an adequate translation of the Greek word eudaimonia (human flourishing, blessedness, good life). The trouble with “happiness,” she says, is that in contemporary English

it connotes something which is subjectively determined. It is for me, not for you, to pronounce on whether I am happy, or on whether my life, as a whole, has been a happy one, for, barring, perhaps, advanced cases of self-deception and the suppression of unconscious misery, if I think I am happy then I am — it is not something I can be wrong about.

I think Hursthouse is severely understating matters here. The cases being “barred” here seem a very common human condition, perhaps even the norm. A case where you tell me “I don’t think you’re really happy,” and I suddenly realize you’re right – where you knew I was unhappy and I didn’t – is not a rare event. It’s what leads to midlife crises; one of the reasons Dr. Phil’s book sold so well is it helps people realize that what they think is happiness isn’t really.

This point – that we can easily be misled about our own present happiness – also poses a significant problem for the growing field of happiness studies and its empirical research on happiness. This is probably the biggest of the methodological problems I mentioned in my previous post.

The most common measure of happiness is self-report (“would you describe yourself as very happy, fairly happy or not too happy?”) This is an obvious and easy measure to use, and surely has some correlation with actual happiness. But it’s easy to take it too far. If self-report is the only way we measure happiness, then there’s a foolproof way to be happy: tell researchers that you are. Or at least, convince yourself that you’re happy without changing anything in the way you actually feel.

Most happiness researchers appear to be at least somewhat aware of this difficulty. The question then is, what indicators can we rely on, if not self-report? Eric Schwitzgebel of The Splintered Mind expresses a justifiable frustration with studies that mention the difficulties with self-report and proceed to use it anyway. (I recall a similar frustration, bordering on bewilderment, in a macroeconomics course I once took, when the professor began the course b explaining the well known reasons why GDP is a stupid measure of well-being, paused, and then said “but we’re going to use it anyway,” without further justification.) Schwitzgebel acknowledges that better measurements are hard to find, but that’s not an excuse to stick with a bad one alone.

Still, we can’t get much further in measuring happiness without asking: what is happiness? What we mean when we say “happiness” nowadays does not seem to be Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia, as a virtuous life provided with adequate material goods and relationships. Happiness is some sort of pleasurable emotional state – but what exactly does that mean?

I suppose Hursthouse is imagining the subjective sense of ‘happiness’ as something like being in a good mood. It’s fairly plausible that you are infallible about whether you are in a good mood, much as you have infallible knowledge about whether you are experiencing pleasant sensations (at least, if you are infallible about anything, those are good candidates). But even in the sense in which ‘happiness’ refers to a purely subjective judgment of one’s own life rather than, say, to an objective achievement of some level of ethical success (or however else you’d like to cash out eudaimonia), it’s much more complicated than mental states like pleasures and moods, since it is at least a somewhat reflective judgment about how one’s life is going. The question is, can you make sense of the idea of being *mistaken* about being happy without making happiness something besides a subjective appraisal? If happiness is just a subjective appraisal, then it would seem that examples of the sort you describe could be understood as changes in the appraisal, not genuine mistakes.

My usual way of dealing with this problem is to say that in whatever sense there is a ‘happiness’ that just consists in having a positive judgment of your life as a whole, it is of extremely limited importance and depends for its significance on whether or not one’s life as a whole actually merits the positive judgment. But I’m a frothing anti-subjectivist, so…

Well, even on temporary mood I’m not sure we’re always reliable. Think of situations on a sitcom: “Why are you so angry?” “I’M NOT ANGRY, DAMMIT!” (character pauses and realizes he actually is angry)

I’ll grant you that we are generally more reliable on moods than on overall life happiness, but Hursthouse does explicitly say she’s talking about the latter too.

The thing about these examples is that, while they do involve changes in the appraisal, the changes are based on data and evidence – especially, the person’s own actions. That suggests that even the assessment of one’s own mood is at least not entirely subjective.

Happiness comes from propagating one’s DNA.
Suffering from things being not at the optimal points.

Happy life requires instincts:

(1) VALID HAPPINESS (including love, sense of beauty, symbiosis (good conscience, upholding justice, moral courage, helping others…) bravery….) must be the feeling of things being a step better for propagating one’s DNA.
(2) WELL-BEING is the ongoing feeling of things going better and better for propagating one’s DNA.
(3) VALID SUFFERING must be the feeling of things being harmful to propagating one’s DNA and calling him/her to prevent or rectify it.
(4) SOUL (including: personality, inspiration,….) is the computation results of both our instinct and pre-instinct data-programs in one’s brain.
(5) LIFE GOAL is to propagate DNA.

All these are our instincts (ancestors’ successful experiences saved on DNA).
Everything in the world has its optimal point for human who suffers from the thing being not at this point, the more the farther.

Socrates’ “happy pig” lives on instincts, but people who suffer from invalid happiness do not.

Hi, and welcome to the blog! I don’t think this scheme works. We have instincts that are related to propagating our DNA, but propagating our DNA and being happy are not closely related goals.

I’ve noted elsewhere on the site that, according to a number of studies, having children, which is to say propagating one’s DNA, doesn’t make one happy. Similarly, acting according to our instincts gets us in a lot of trouble. Our instincts lead us to get angry, to lust inappropriately, to believe false things – all things that the Buddha criticized. Part of the reason is probably because, biologically and culturally, we evolved in such a way as to make more children whether or not it makes us happier. But if we are going to reflect on life and how to live it well, I think, what we need to do is move away from our instincts. I don’t think Ben-Shahar’s six points have anything to do with propagating DNA, overall. In many cases our instincts lead us away from it. On #5, for example, our instincts lead us to sloth and unhealthy eating habits – that’s why so many people have unhealthy bodies. If we’re going to be healthy, we need to fight against our instincts.

[EDIT: I originally had accidentally said “unhealthy” rather than “healthy” in the last sentence.]

Happiness is what one makes it. An individual can be happy with just the basic neccessaties in life. Happiness does not depend on another being, just ones self. I am just glad to be here. And that makes me happy.

Welcome to the blog, Sarita! Overall I would agree with much of what you’re saying – basically, I think, that happiness does not need to depend on external goods. The question still remains how we can know whether we’re happy – whether we might just be deluding ourselves and thinking we’re happy when we aren’t.

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